Most companies wouldn’t let everyone have access to a vault of money, but many companies don’t think about limiting access to data within their organizations

That’s where ALTR comes in. It breaks up data and stores it using blockchain technology, making it inaccessible to an intruder or someone who doesn’t have the key.

ALTR, a data security company, quietly came out of stealth mode last June and announced it had raised $15 million in venture capital.

For four years, a team of engineers worked on the software behind ALTR, said David Sikora, a software industry veteran and former executive chairman at Stratfor, a global research, and intelligence platform. He is a veteran technology executive and the CEO of ALTR.

“Blockchain is a pretty profound new
development, akin to where the Internet was back in the 1994-95 timeframe and
the founding team of ALTR really got a great head start,” Sikora said.

Silicon Hills News recently sat down with Sikora, to talk about ALTR’s cybersecurity platform built with blockchain technology on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

Austin-based ALTR launched its
cybersecurity platform built with blockchain technology last year and has
customers in the healthcare industry and financial services. It also has 18
patents that have been issued and several more pending.

Early on, the founding team behind ALTR,
who came from Wall Street options trading, saw how blockchain technology could
be used to differentiate the data security landscape and they started investing
in protecting those innovations, Sikora said. At one point and time, ALTR had
10 percent of all the issued patents in blockchain technology in the country,
he said. A lot of the patents they’ve filed relate to how ALTR is breaking up
and storing data in the blockchain, Sikora said.

ALTR’s platform consists
of an ALTR monitor, ALTR govern and ALTR protect. It integrates into existing
computer networks and supports Microsoft, Oracle and open-source database
platforms. Like a 10,000 piece puzzle, ALTR breaks data into small pieces and
stores it on different servers so if hackers break into a computer system, they
can only access fragments of data.

And recently ALTR partnered with San
Antonio-based Sirius Computer Solutions to provide blockchain-based data
security as a managed service. That partnership helps the company reach even
more businesses, Sikora said.

And
ALTR’s blockchain technology is being used to secure data in the healthcare
field. Recently FRTYL adopted the ALTR platform to protect health records
involved in fertility treatment and IVF.

A lot of hype and focus on Blockchain
cryptocurrency has cooled considerably this year but there are more startups
focused on using blockchain for healthcare, journalism, and verification
purposes. Blockchain technology is becoming more mainstream, Sikora said.

ALTR is also a member of the Austin Blockchain
Collective, which is comprised of more than 120 companies in Austin. But ALTR
doesn’t consider itself to be a blockchain company, Sikora said. It’s a
software cybersecurity company that uses the blockchain to protect data.